Checking In On The Winter Garden

This post is going to be a little photo-heavy.  I was home this weekend, so it was the first time in a couple weeks that I was able to observe the garden in daylight hours.  Tricia and I alternated rows and were able to weed the garden.  It is much easier with the wood chip mulch covering the garden soil.  I think it discourages some weed growth.  With the weeds that emerge, it is easier to pull them up by the roots since the soil is softer with the mulch covering.

Let's take a look at what's growing.  Here is a row of turnips.  I'm not a turnip fan.  We'll mainly feed them to the cows.  I'll thin them out, though, and we'll eat the turnip greens.

Here is one of the breakfast radishes.  Radishes grow so quickly.  We primarily eat these in a radish dip with crackers.  They'll be ready for harvest in a week or two.

We plant several varieties of lettuce.  Here is some Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce:

Some Red Romaine:

And some Rocky Top Mixed Lettuce:

Some Mustard Greens:

Some Beets:

And Cabbage:

Unfortunately, a very early freeze this year dipped temperatures into the low 20's.  This decimated my broccoli and cauliflower.  I lost about 95% of them!

The sugar snap peas made it, though, and I'm training them to trellis right now.  They'll be climbing in no time.

The carrots were slow to germinate and a little thin, but I think they'll be fine.

Here is our row of spinach:

You can see that our garlic has sprouted.  I'll soon be mulching these:

Here is some rainbow chard:

Bad news in that our bok choy and kale seed that we saved over the years succumbed to poor germination.  We'll have no bok choy or kale this year.

I did see some cilantro sprouting up volunteer this year, however.

Overall, the garden was planted later than normal.  Thus, it is a little slower to grow than in previous years.  Usually we are harvesting kale by now.  I think things will be fine if we don't have a hard freeze in the next few weeks.  Perhaps later this week, we'll give a critique of the Back to Eden Garden method we're trying so far.